The Rally Software Building in Boulder was recently sold to Texas-based Lionstone Investments. (Photo courtesy of CBRE)

The Rally Software Building in Boulder has been sold to Houston-based Lionstone Investments, commercial real estate firm CBRE announced Thursday.

The sales price for the 154,476-square-foot office property at 3333 Walnut St. was not disclosed. The property, built in phases in 1998 and 2014, was 100 percent leased to Rally Software at the time of the sale June 17. Rally has a long-term lease commitment in place and its tenancy was not affected by the sale, according to a CBRE spokeswoman.

“Lionstone is thrilled to be in the Boulder market. This area is highly educated and is home to an innovative and growing tech industry,” said Lionstone Investments CEO Jane Page in a statement. “The Rally Software Building offers tenants top of the line amenities and the campus environment their talent prefers.”

The battle over whether or not the City of Boulder moves ahead with creating its own municipal utility is being fought out on local TV screens — and Youtube.

The November ballot has two competing measures that will be a key in deciding the future of the city’s plans to replace the investor-owned Xcel Energy with a municipal electric power company.

And thanks to inexpensive local cable advertising rates – Boulder voters can watch the municipal utility battle on there TV screens.

One group — Voter Approval of Debt Limits – has placed a measure on the ballot, Question 310, that requires voter approval of a municipal utility’s debt limit and the cost if debt repayment.

The group’s contention is that the cost of taking over Xcel’s operations to create a municipal utility is such an unknown – the city has bracketed the cost at $124 million to a worst-case $405 million – that Boulder residents face an undue financial risk.

“We just believe there ought to be voter oversight,” said Kathy Atkinson, a spokeswoman for the group. The group has received $300,000 in support from Xcel.

In the next seven years revenues from e-bikes are project to grow nearly 30 percent to $11 billion, according to Boulder-based Navigant Research, a market research and consulting group.

The Chinese market – which is 92 percent of the world market – is expected to reach 28 million e-bicycles in 2013, even as Chinese cities begin to consider bans on e-bicycles because of increasing accident and bicycle congestion, wrote Navigant analyst Dave Hurst.

While Asia and Europe are the two big e-bicycle markets, Navigant projects a 9.7 percent annual growth in North America, making it one of the fastest growing markets.Read more…

Quickly growing Evol Foods, the Boulder-based maker of Evol frozen burritos and other all-natural eats, says it received a $4 million investment from New York private equity fund Alliance Consumer Growth.

The company announced the investment, which also includes San Francisco-based Bee Partners, earlier this week. A company spokeswoman said Thursday the amount was $4 million.

Evol said the new capital will allow it to accelerate its nationwide distribution and expand product innovations and marketing.

Boulder chef-entrepreneur Phil Anson launched Phil’s Fresh Foods in 2004 with a line of frozen burritos. In 2009, the company received an investment from Brendan Synnott and Tom Spier, founders of Bear Naked Granola, and changed its name to Evol (“love” spelled backwards).

Anson focuses on product innovation and quality, and Spier and Synnott are involved in building the brand. Evol now sells frozen burritos, wraps, snacks, entrée bowls, pizzas and flatbreads.

Boulder-based Standing Cloud, one of a growing number of Colorado startups specializing in cloud computing, says it has raised $3 million in new financing, bringing its total funding to $8 million.

The new funds came from existing Standing Cloud investors Foundry Group of Boulder and Avalon Ventures, which operates out of La Jolla, Calif., and Cambridge, Mass.

Brad Feld

Standing Cloud offers application-management services to cloud service providers. The company was founded in 2009 and is headed by Dave Jilk, founder of several Boulder companies and co-founder of Feld Technologies with Foundry Group managing partner Brad Feld.Read more…

The key to the victory in last night’s ballot initiative that gave Boulder city officials a green light to develop a municipality utility to replace Xcel Energy as the community’s electricity provider was late filed ballots by over 50 voters, says Boulder City Councilman Macon Cowles.

“There had been a big undecided vote in that demographic, but in the final weeks it seemed that we were finding more and more people supporting the ballot measure,” Cowles said.

Those late votes were the last counted and pushed the municipal utility campaign to victory.

Still, the margins in the two ballot initiatives were razor thin.

One ballot measure that gives the city the power to explore creating a municipal utility and the bond to raise bonds for it passed with 51.78 percent of the vote.

A second ballot question to extended and raise the utility occupation tax, creating an additional $1.9 million a year to finance the engineering and legal costs of developing a municipal utility squeaked by with 50.27 percent of the vote.Read more…

SolidFire, a cloud-computing storage company that moved to Boulder from the Atlanta area in May to tap talent from the data-storage industry, has raised $25 million in a second funding round.

Dave Wright

It brings to $37 million the amount of venture capital that SolidFire, launched less than two years ago, has raised this year. The new investment comes from New Enterprise Associates, Valhalla Partners, Novak Biddle and several individual investors from the data-storage industry.

SolidFire is founder Dave Wright’s third startup. In 2008 he sold his previous company, Jungle Disk, to Rackspace. He assembled SolidFire’s team from Boulder’s LeftHand Networks (now part of HP) and other storage companies.Read more…

When it comes to the ballot questions of whether the City of Boulder should create its own municipal electricity utility the combatants were pretty predictable.

On one side was Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest utility which faces the loss of Boulder as a service area, and many Boulder businesses, including the Chamber of Commerce.

On the other side was an array of local elected officials, grass-roots groups pushing renewable energy and local control, and the Boulder Clean Energy Business Coalition.

Then about a month ago New Era Colorado – a five-year-old, non-profit group promoting political activism among young people – joined the fray.

“One of our core issues is energy and environment. It is something young people care a lot about,” said Steve Fenberg, a New Era organizer. New Era says rather than being left or right it is forward. It can also be funny.

So, New Era is planning to do door-to-door canvassing in support of the municipal utility plan on Halloween night – in costume.

And they produced this video spot promoting a Coal Energy Drink – check it out.

Emilie Rusch covers retail and commercial real estate for The Post. A Wisconsin native and Mizzou graduate, she moved to Colorado in 2012. Before that, she worked at a small daily newspaper in South Dakota. It's the one with Mount Rushmore.